Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu

by Lois H. Gresh

  “Please,” I said, “that is no longer necessary, Willie.”

  In response, he made a fist and started batting his nose with his knuckles. His left hand flew to his head and picked at a large scab, which cracked open and oozed blood.

  “Willie,” I said, “please,” but all he did was moan and mutter at me.

  “N-nurse Amy, you’re goin’ to kill me?” he managed to sputter, yet he did not struggle.

  Oh, this poor man, I thought. He suffers constantly. The agony must be unbearable.

  Enduring all this pain, he built Eshockers for Dr. Sinclair. He hammered them together, he wired them. I wondered what Willie Jacobs could have done with his life had he not been born to the man who forced him to work in the tram machine building. I wondered what he might have achieved, how long he might have lived. No doubt, he would have married and had children. That’s what most people did…

  Except for me, of course. But it wasn’t my fault. Nobody had asked for my hand in marriage, much less wished me to bear their children. I was barren. Empty. Devoid. Nothing in here, nothing but a sad heart yearning endlessly for what it could never have.

  “I understand suffering,” I told him gently. “Now, I want you to relax. Stop picking at your head, Willie. Stop picking at your nose. Let your arms relax by your sides. That’s a good boy, that’s good.” As he did as I told him, I stroked his arm and then his bald scalp and forehead. After I finished with him, I’d get a cloth from the nurses’ station and wipe the blood from the left side of his face. He would be more comfortable that way.

  I shot a few drops of liquid from the needle, then turned his arm slightly and positioned the needle over the inner flesh in the crook of his elbow. Same place I’d injected Caroline Brown. Same place Miss Klune and I injected all the inmates.

  His hand flew out and gripped my arm.

  “No!” he cried. “I won’t let you do it! I ain’t ready to die!”

  The needle clattered across the floor. My heart grew hard.

  “Shut up,” I hissed, clamping a hand over his mouth.

  He squirmed and kicked me. I sat on his stomach, squashing him to the bed, and when he beat me with his fists, I again pinned both of his arms down, this time up by his bleeding head.

  “You will be quiet,” I hissed. “You will take your medicine, Mr. Jacobs. Or I will report you.”

  He started screaming—wildly now, and I could hear patients awakening up and down the hall. Soon, the front guard would come, maybe Dr. Sinclair himself.

  Damn you, Willie Jacobs, I thought. Don’t you see that this is best for you?

  The idiots never saw what was best, though, did they? It was always up to us—the nurses, the staff—to attend to their every need.

  Well, I’ll take care of you, Willie Jacobs, I thought.

  Abruptly, I jumped off the bed, scooped up the needle, whirled, pinned his right arm down flat, and jammed the needle into his flesh.

  Jacobs shrieked and cursed, kicked his legs up and down, jerked his body from side to side, slapped at me with his left hand. But it did no good. I was Miss Amy Switzer. I was a professional.

  The medicine flowed into his bloodstream, and in a flash, his struggling ceased, his body relaxed, and he fell into a deep sleep.

  The other inmates on the floor screamed, but before long, they too fell back into the drug-induced slumber of the insane. After all, shrieking was common in the corridors, whether it be day or night. Even the night guard didn’t come to investigate the noise…

  I waited, listening to the whimpers die.

  The hypodermic needle had ejected a lot of liquid when Willie had slapped it from my hand and it had skittered across the floor. He’d not received the full dose I’d intended for him.

  When he moaned and quivered, I knew that I’d failed to put him to sleep… forever, to sleep.

  It wouldn’t take much for me to retrieve more medicine from the nurses’ station and finish the job…

  Returning to the hall, I shut the door and looked in both directions. Nothing. I was about to hurry to the nurses’ station and get the medicine when I stopped short. I heard a noise, a chair scraping. Then the door to the reception area creaked open.

  Someone was coming.

  Quickly, I ran to the other end of the hall and around the corner. I would circle around, and while the guard checked the inmates, I would duck out of the building unnoticed.

  31

  PROFESSOR MORIARTY

  Whitechapel Eshocker Den

  Amelia Scarcliffe possessed power beyond anything I’d ever witnessed. Fierce and determined, she cared for nothing but achieving her goals, that of giving birth to hell spawn and unleashing Old Ones upon the Earth. An amazing creature, she could breathe beneath the water as well as on the land. I viewed her as a weapon.

  She sat cross-legged on the battered sofa in the room behind the Eshocker den. Webbed fingers shoved raw fish into her mouth. She’d bathed and donned what passed for a clean dress. It was actually a sack with holes cut for her neck and arms. Matted and thick like tangled netting, her hair hung over her face as she ate, and occasionally, she swept it back with a fish-filthy hand.

  “Water,” she hissed, and I handed her a pail. She dropped bloody fish on her lap, lifted the pail, and drank, letting the water splash over her face and drench her upper body. Then she lifted the fish remains again and chewed. She spat out a bone.

  Blood-red eyes with pus-colored irises glared at me. The light from the gas lamp on the wall played across her face, danced in multicolored hues upon the exotic ridges of her cheekbones. The ridges shimmered like fish scales. Then there were the neck flaps—as she swallowed, they swelled and bobbed against each other, somehow so enticing that I had to jerk my eyes away to keep my thoughts steady.

  “You controlled the needles that plunged out of that mistletoe and killed my man, Lloyd, eh?” I asked her.

  She tossed fish bones into a pile by my feet, making me hop back a step. She laughed.

  “You think you’re very smart, Professor Moriarty, but you don’t know anything,” she said.

  “So educate me,” I countered. “Tell me all that I don’t know. Tell me, Miss Scarcliffe, if you can control aspects of nature itself, if you can kill a man using that control, then… can you also call forth these creatures who inhabit the Thames? Can you make them kill as you did with the mistletoe?”

  “You ask too many questions.”

  With much effort, she lifted her bulk from the floor, clenching her swollen belly. Her giant feet slapped across the floor, the toe suckers popping up with each step. Pointing to the door, she ordered me to open it and release her. I refused. She inched closer to me, and as she spoke, each word came from her lips in a stench of fish breath. I stared down at the shimmering cheekbones, and this close, they were so intoxicating that I broke out in a sweat, my head reeling. Again, she laughed at me.

  I broke away, moved to the door, and rested my right hand on the knob. Outside, my agents would make sure nobody came in or out of this room unless I authorized it. This woman, or whatever she was, would not get the better of me.

  “Afraid of me, Professor?” she taunted, her belly bulging in one direction and now another. She leapt forward like a frog. Her webbed feet landed by the door. Her hand rested on mine.

  It was my turn to laugh at her.

  “What are you going to do out there, Miss Scarcliffe? Eshock yourself? Mingle with the decrepit? Get drunk and sing pub tunes? What?”

  Her gills rippled with color. The neck flaps pulsed in an odd three-quarter rhythm, then skipped to rapid trebles.

  I caught my breath. Resisting the beat of the neck flaps—the high-pitched trebles skittering over my nerves—I stared directly into her eyes, knowing they might catch me in their embrace and pull me further under her spell. Nobody outmaneuvered me. Nobody—not Sherlock Holmes, and certainly not this female.

  “What I’d like to do out there,” she said in a flat monotone, “is kill everyone in
the den, kill you, and then leave.”

  As soon as Timmy Dorsey, Sr. and his latest crew conquered and secured the tram machine building, I planned to send Amelia Scarcliffe over there to utter her incantations and bring forth gold. I would see to it that the machine received its phosphorus and lead. I would do whatever it took to create the gold.

  That was the ultimate objective. All the rest of this nonsense—the Eshockers, the Old Ones Serum, the dens, that idiot Sinclair and his idiot asylum, Amelia Scarcliffe, Maria Fitzgerald—I didn’t care about any of that. I wanted the gold.

  “You’ll have your fun in the tram machine building,” I said, then my voice turned cold. “You’ve eaten. You have water. Now go back in your corner where you belong.” Pointing to the rear of the room, where the serum teetered in stacks, I added, “Get out of my way. I have things to do.”

  “What are you going to do if I refuse?” she hissed.

  “Trust me, my dear, you won’t enjoy finding out.”

  She nodded, most likely remembering how we had attacked her, overpowered her, and trussed her in a sack. With all that power, I thought, she can’t do the simplest thing, like get loose from a sack. How amusing.

  Her powers were limited, but exactly how or why, I did not know.

  As she slunk off to settle in the dust again, I left the room and entered the main den, where a dozen or more men and women slumped against the walls or swooned in the Eshockers. Others wore the electrotherapy belts, girdles, and hats, their bodies shaking, their eyes not registering my presence. They were lost in other worlds, in their fantasies, or perhaps just floating in the nothingness of ecstasy, the high of all highs.

  The room could accommodate a lot more customers. My procurement agent had assured me that, any day now, Dr. Sinclair—that idiot Sinclair!—would deliver a dozen Eshockers to my men. It just wasn’t enough.

  My sources told me that Sinclair used super-potent Eshockers that he built and wired in the asylum. I wouldn’t mind obtaining some of those machines. But how—break into the lunatic asylum, find the Eshockers, and then spirit them out of the building?

  Imagine the profits. My current customers would spring ten times the going rate for a super-Eshocking.

  Assuming I obtained Sinclair’s special Eshockers, I could then dispense with the idiot doctor and hire my own team of machinists to build them.

  A high-pitched shriek shattered the air. From the back room, Amelia Scarcliffe warbled and screamed words that made no sense.

  “Uriaiava. Auro! Aera aere aero.”

  The Eshockers shook, the bodies strapped into them shook even harder. Addicts on the floor wailed and held their heads. Those in the belts and girdles screamed in ecstasy. Women writhed, ripped off their clothes. Men fell to the floor, beat their heads against the walls.

  Miss Scarcliffe’s voice went higher, and as her fists pounded on the back door in beats of three, she continued to wail the strange words.

  “Shigeonoth shiggaion pharemake perosephora peresibutero paieti raumea toatoaarii eh toatoa.”

  My agents, all tough men, ran to the Eshockers and started switching them off. Three remained by Miss Scarcliffe’s door. I inched toward the front door, ready to race to the street. Let my men handle the meat work, I thought. That’s why I pay them.

  Beating the door like a drum, Miss Scarcliffe continued.

  “Ebb’yuh dissoth’nknpflknghreet. Urre’h. Nyogthluh’eeh.”

  The addicts feebly tried to fight off my agents, who were attempting to pull them away from the machines, but what could they do against my men? They screamed to be released, they demanded the return of their money, and some clearly were so far gone they couldn’t open their mouths to utter anything, much less scream.

  “Quiet!” I held up my hand, and everyone in the room fell silent, bar a few whimpers.

  Miss Scarcliffe had reverted to the English language.

  “Great Cthulhu, yearning for land, for us, from Beyond in the great sea. I see you, I hear you, I come to you. Those in the Thames, flicker in and out, stay with us, stay in your homeland, where we serve you and gladly give our lives.”

  My men distracted, the addicts crawled back to the Eshockers and climbed into the seats. They crawled to the electro belts and the girdles. Their hands flapped at the straps, unable to grab hold and attach the ties to their bodies. The flapping intensified, grew more incessant, the addicts screaming with frustration, their faces red, their eyes dim, their bodies convulsing.

  “Uriaiava. Auro! Aera aere aero! Cthulhu! Cthulhu!” Miss Scarcliffe shrieked.

  “Cthulhu! Cthulhu!” The addicts took up the call and started pounding the floor, the walls, and the Eshockers with their fists.

  What does this mean, this Cthulhu? I wondered.

  Was this another monster, something like those in the Thames? Was it something worse? By bringing Amelia Scarcliffe to London, had I unleashed unutterable horror upon the city, something even I had no power to destroy?

  32

  DR. JOHN WATSON

  Whitechapel

  “How are you getting on, Holmes?” I asked, as we passed the butcher’s shop run by Timmy Dorsey, Sr. The air was particularly rancid here, as if the day’s rain had been blood. The humidity made breathing difficult. Several times, Holmes and I had stopped to wipe the perspiration—a brownish grime—from our faces.

  “I assume you refer to my accommodation at the Diogenes Club?” Holmes said in a world-weary tone. “Unlike more civilized clubs, the Diogenes discourages overnight guests in the same way that it does inveterate talkers. I have a small room, ten feet by eight feet, rather like an inmate’s room at the Whitechapel Lunatic Asylum. The bed is hard and a little too short, which is why I have been limping half the morning.”

  Despite the comfort of my Baker Street bed, my war-injured leg hurt all night every night, leaving me drowsy during the day. I understood well what Holmes was experiencing, but in his case, he could choose the easy solution, the return to his Baker Street bed.

  “But you’re not injured,” I said. “You are torturing yourself needlessly on that hard bed. You must have finished your research at the Diogenes by now. Why not return to your lodgings at Baker Street? You’re subjecting yourself to the infected London environment every day, not to mention that of Avebury, so what good is it doing for you to sleep at Mycroft’s club?”

  “Contrary to what you may think, Doctor, I have yet to find any evidence in the Diogenes resources of bizarre brain infestations and mutated animals dwelling in the Thames. However, I require utmost quiet and solitude,” Holmes said, his voice lowering, “for now.”

  “But why?” I persisted.

  “I want no distractions,” came the curt reply.

  As he spoke, a man stumbled through the murk toward us and clutched at me. Without thinking, I slapped his hand—a webbed hand!—from my arm, then with horror, took in his visage—crater head, bulging eyes, greenish cast to the skin.

  “Serum. Eh’bbguttth. Eshockin’. Be goin’ to the Thames,” the man muttered. “You go, see what’s real. You go.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, my man,” I said, “and I suggest that you stay away from the river. There are monsters in the water—they nearly killed us.”

  Holmes gestured at the man’s bowed legs and giant triangular feet.

  “How long have you been this way?”

  “Like what?” His voice took on a defensive tone, and he wobbled and almost fell. I reached out and steadied him, hiding my disgust at the feel of slime coating his shirt. I gave him a reassuring smile, the one I use with patients whose illness is incurable. Comfort is lacking in this world, and whenever we can supply a small amount, we should. A dose of comfort, if combined with a million other doses, might someday counteract evil.

  Certainly, evil surrounded us here in Whitechapel. Wasn’t it in the grimy air that reeked of stale blood? Wasn’t it in whatever infected this man—infected me?

  The man’s head drooped, displaying the crater t
op more clearly. Like so many men I’d seen lately, he was bald with scabs on his scalp. This poor fellow’s crater was one big scoop of a scab filled with the brownish sludge that seemed suspended in the very air. When he tilted his head, the sludge oozed slightly forward.

  Holmes leaned in to peer at the sludge more closely.

  “How long?” he asked again, his right hand dipping into his coat pocket and retrieving a vial containing a small medical swab. My God, I thought, he’s going to take a sample of the gore on the man’s head.

  “You have been at an Eshocking den, I see,” Holmes went on. “You observe, Watson, those scabs on his head? Electrical burns, no doubt, thanks to faulty equipment or misapplication.”

  Our new acquaintance did not follow this conversation at all, but he reacted to the words he knew well enough by blurting out, “I like the dens, and I be Eshockin’ for I dunno ’ow long. Nothin’ wrong with it, is there?”

  Holmes had already removed the swab from the vial. Before the man could react, he dipped it into his head crater, swirled the sludge on the tip of the swab, and sealed it in the vial.

  “What say—?” The man’s eyes flashed angrily, then fell back into the glazed look of the Eshocked. “What… say…” His voice trailed off. He had already forgotten about the swab and the vial. He stared at Holmes as if trying to remember something.

  How long before I became like this man? Would I end up bald with a crater head filled with sludge? Would my feet somehow grow webbed, my hands? What would happen to me if I didn’t cure myself of my own infection?

  As Holmes slipped the vial back into his pocket, I pushed him along the street away from the strange man, who just stood there, looking baffled, until finally, he fell against the wall of the MEAT building. He grasped his head with webbed hands, slipping his fingers into the sludge-filled crater.

  “My God!” I exclaimed. “Holmes, we must examine the sludge you collected from that poor man. We must find Timmy and get the animals as quickly as possible. We must solve this case. I believe that all life might depend on it.”